Conspiracy Theories

20 May 2003 11:51

The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, at least in the West, goes something
like this: There is an ubiquitous secret society in our midst, alien to our
religion, which aims to seize control of the world, or at least the only part
of it which counts, i.e. ours. They are everywhere; they are ruthless and
powerful (often, supernaturally powerful); they are sexually corrupt (often,
incestuous); they preform the very worst of crimes, perhaps as rituals (often,
infanticide, cannibalism and religious desecration). This is the burden of Norman Cohn's superb Europe's Inner
Demons, and I think Cohn is absolutely correct. The oldest versions of
this story he could find were in Livy (where the Romans applied it to the
Bacchantes). It was later applied by the pagans to the Christians, by the
Christians to the Jews and all manner of heretics, then by Christians to (non-existent) witches; and
at that point Cohn leaves off. Since then of course Jews and heretics have
continued to be fashionable, but it has also been applied to Catholics, philosophes, Freemasons, Communists, homosexuals, radicals, aristocrats, etc.,
etc. It is still powerful and still with us. Read alt.conspiracy or alt.illuminati or alt.usenet.kooks --- to say nothing of the
tons of apocalyptic and conspiratorial tracts issuing from the presses each
year --- and this will become obvious. Look up the
tactics the Church of Scientology uses to smear its opponents; listen to a
televangelist for a while. --- Nor is it confined to the soft, dark underbelly
of thought (confined there? whatever isn't there is confined!).
Michael Crichton, for instance, uses it in his xenophobic novel Rising
Sun; it is the substance of the "satanic ritual abuse" myth
promulgated by respected psychotherapists, on the basis of conditions they
create in their patients; Republican attacks on "counter-cultural McGoverniks,"
the "cultural
elite," the "media elite," etc. are a (for the moment, mild) version. It
is now as it has always been the mainstay of demagogues, and for some reason it
seems Americans are particularly vulnerable to it.

One is tempted to say that conspiracies are the characteristic lunacy of the
Right, as millennia are of the Left; but no
doubt there are plenty of counter-examples.

Questions: Why are we fascinated by this kind of conspiracy? What
do conspiracies from other cultures look like?

The last word on this subject deserves to go to Randall "xkcd" Munroe (click for the full-size version):

Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American
Fascism [No that title is not overblown; LaRouche is not just
an unusually well-read paranoid, he's actually quite disgusting when you take a
good look. I did, after a LaRouchie tried to recruit me on the basis of one of my notebooks.]

Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A
Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator
[Free full
text. Reprinted in Lowenthal's collection False Prophets: Studies on
Authoritarianism]

Focus on the Family, August 1995 is an interesting
variant of the myth, where the Conspiracy is split into two allied parts, one
of which (American "gender feminists") is sexually decadent and plotting to
take over God's Own Country, the other (the Chinese Communists) cannibalistic.
Yes, that's right, the Chicom are cannibals: of aborted fetuses, what else? It
was in a magazine, so it must be true. This particular detail, fetus-eating,
also features in some incarnations of the Satanic Ritual Abuse myth, and goes
back, as readers of Cohn's The Pursuit of the
Millennium may recall, to the prophecy known as
Pseudo-Methodius in the seventh or eighth century AD. Its
application to the Chinese is specially ironic, as there have been
widely-believed rumors in China that European missionaries established
orphanages to get children to eat. The author of this altogether unpleasant
piece is James C. Dobson, Ph.D. a "licensed psychologist" (surprise,
surprise!), "author of 13 best-selling books on marriage and the family,
including The New Dare to Discipline,The Strong-Willed
Child,Love Must Be Tough,Parenting Isn't for
Cowards,Children at Risk and When God Doesn't Make
Sense. [These are mainly notable for advocating corporal punishment as
the most effective means of breaking the wills of children; see Wendy Kaminer,
I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional.].... Dr. Dobson was
appointed by President Reagan to the National Advisory Commission for Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He also served on the Attorney General's
Commission on Pornography and on the Attorney General's Advisory board on
Missing and Exploited Children."
Addendum (1): The Chinese-eat-aborted-babies myth is
spreading. Vide this page "One
Man's Ministry", part of a series of pages about a gargantuan road-side Cross in (where else?) Texas.
The author wrote for permission to link to one of my pages (presumably not this
one!), which of course I granted, but he doesn't seem to have gotten around to
it yet. [14 May 1996] [Those links are now dead and gone, alas: 18 February
2000]
Addendum (2): The original web-site with the on-line
article is down, and it's not available from the official Focus on the Family web-site
(understandably), which in fact seems mostly devoted to flogging Dr. Dobson's
inspirational tapes. [4 November 1998]

Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer [or Kraemer or Institoris],
Malleus Maleficarum ["The Hammer of Witches"; a 15th century
witch-hunter's manual. The English translation by Montague Summers (reprinted
by Dover Books) is particularly appalling, in as much as Father Summers
believed, and argued at length, that Sprenger and Kramer were both correct and
justified.]

I wish I could recommend,

Shalizi et alii, The Story So Far, but as a conspiracy theory it's a failure (we were far too nice)

To read:

James A. Aho, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian
Patriotism